LabVIEW Idea Exchange

It has come up in discusssions that NI does not really cater to hobbyists. A cheap and functional version of LabVIEW is limited to the student edition, which is restricted to a small subset of potential users.

 From the  FAQ:

"The LabVIEW Student Edition is available to students, faculty, and staff for personal educational use only. It is not intended for research or institutional use."

As a suggested first step, I suggest to remove the academia restriction and mold it into a new product:

--- LabVIEW personal edition ---

Licensed as follows:

"The LabVIEW Personal Edition is for personal use only. It is not intended for commercial, research or institutional use."

 It would be available to anyone for noncommercial home use.

LabVIEW currently has the home use exemption that allows installing a copy at home. Unfortunately, if you lose your job, you not only lose your health insurance, but you also lose access to LabVIEW, thus hampering any self paced LabVIEW tinkering that possibly would improve future job prospects. I am sure many retired LabVIEW engineers would love some recreational LabVIEW use. They could be a great asset, because they will have more time helping out in the community and forums. They could even give guest presentations at user group meetings, for example.

The LabVIEW personal edition should include all modules of interest to the hobbyist, including application builder, embedded, FPGA, and robotics.  We should be able to distribute built applications as freeware. Support would be limited to community support.

Installing LabVIEW on every single private home computer in the world would cost NI exactly nothing (except for some sales of the current student edition which is about the price of a textbook, some internet bandwidth, and loss of the zero to two (?) multi-millionaires who actually bought the NI developer suite for themselves. ;)). 99.9% of users would never touch it, but that 0.1% could come up with great new application areas and would help spread the word on how great LabVIEW really is. Soon 0.2% would use it. 🙂

It should follow the "customer class limited" Freemium model, (as defined by Chris Anderson), i.e. limited to personal home use in this case.

The running applications should be clearly identified to prevent commercial use. The splash screen and "about" screen should prominently display the words LabVIEW and National Instruments and could even be used for NI advertising and product placements, for example.

Block diagram string constants have a useful feature "Size to text" which is accessible through the standard right click menu.  One way in which this is useful is to ensure that information in an array of constants is not hidden: Right click on an element of a string-constant array and select "Size to text" and it will expand to show the full length of all the strings it contains.

What's needed is an equivalent for numerics (including rings and enums).  When dropped singly, these constants expand and shrink around their contents.  But if you drop a numeric constant on an array constant, it takes the size of the numeric and can only be expanded manually.  If you then enter a constant that is longer, only the first part will be shown, and there is no indication that the values are truncated.  (see image)

I think that arrays of numeric constants should resize to show everything entered, automatically.

Make possible that Boolean function accept error cluster as input as this example:

I don't know how many times I've added a case statement post-programming, but I do know that there isn't an easy way to make a tunnel the case selector.  Usually I delete the tunnel and then drag the case selector down and then rewire, there should be an easier way.  For loops and while loops have an easy way to index/unindex or replace with shift register, why can't a case statement be the same?

...the ability to bulk-create References, Local Variables, Property Nodes...

Resizing the front panel so it is correct when running the VI is still very tedious and can easily mess up during editing. The problem is even more severe for Xcontrols, because their runtime size is often very small so there is not even enough room to e.g. display all the tools in the tool bar during editing. Once the runtime size is correctly set, all it needs is a double-click on a terminal that has its FP item hidden outside the visible area and everything on the FP shifts and messes up.

We need three things:

1. An "edit time" FP size that is "comfortably big" so we can see the entire toolbar and possibly also helper controls and even maybe some comment text intended for the programmer that are outside the operator area and only used for debugging and such.
2. A "run time" FP size that matches exactly what the operator sees during running.
3. A special decoration or other visual cue during editing that indicates the FP area that will be visible at runtime.

 We already have the crosshair in the upper left corner when showing the grid, so that could be defined as the upper left corner at runtime by default. All we need is define the upper left and lower right corner and the runtime FP area is uniquely defined. As a visual cue, everything outside the runtime area could be a shade darker or tinted differently than normal to indicate that fact. Running the VI would snap the FP boundaries to the bright area.

Then we also need handles to move any of the boundaries at single pixel increments. A control that scales with the front panel would simply scale to the bright area instead. Of course a legacy mode for older VIs that did not have this feature during their creation needs also to be supported.

The example image shows a reddish transparent area (just to throw out another idea, maybe a slightly darker grey would be better). This is one of my own subVIs that demonstrates the problem at hand. At runtime, only the progress bar should be visible, while at edit time, I want to see all controls, because I might need them e.g. to wire the connectors. It is not easy to switch between the two sizes.

(Of course we can currently program around all that by setting windows parameters via property nodes, but it is ugly, inefficient, and tedious.)

I often make small For Loops using Auto-Indexing, and only occasionally do I use either the Iteration Terminal or Count Terminal. My current practice is to tuck the Iteration Terminal under the Count Terminal just to get it out of the way, shown below. I propose that these two terminals can be shown or hidden (circled in green), just like the Conditional Terminal.

Here's an example of the new lower-profile For Loop with the unnecessary terminals hidden:

Current Situation

The current commenting practice in the BD is to place free floating comment number labels and write the comment in a text field as in the example below.

Disadvantages

- comment number labels do to stick to the code block. if the code number block is moved the comment has to be moved as well.

- no link between number and comment text block

This unsophisticated way of commenting LabView code lead to the lack of comments in general. Usually a new programmer can understand what happens, but not why a function is implemented like this.

Proposal

LabView provides the Advanced Code Commenting Functions.

The comment block is more then just a text block. Basically it has a comment ID, the comment itself and a comment category.

By the context menu the following functions are provide:

1. add comment
2. delete comment
3. move comment up
       The particular comment line is moved up in the comment block. The ID is decremented
4. move comment down
        Opposite from 3.
5. highlight function
        The function to which the comment ID sticks is highlighted.
6. the comment category can be selected. (e.g.. Code Explanation, To Do, )

Adding Comments

Adding a comment in the comment block incorporates two steps (after selecting Add Comment from the context menu):

1. Sticking the automatically generated comment ID to a particular code block just by selecting the item the comment belongs to.

   This could be any type of code: wires, SubVIs, the whole Case, a particular Case, Sequences....

2. Writing the comment

If the mouse pointer is set over a comment ID the comment is shown like a tool tip and disappears as soon as the mouse is moved away.

Advantages

• Comment moves with function block if function is moved on the BD
• Comment ID sticked on the BD item and ID on the comment block always match
• generally more comments in a LabView programm through more simple way of commenting code